Alcatel-Lucent trumpets new base station vision

Alcatel-Lucent has announced that from 2012 it will have a new active antenna design that can handle multi-mode traffic and be deployed in a much more cost-effective and flexible manner than current antennas. Allied to this Al-Lu has said it wil develop a system-on chip base station and the intention to put control and management software in “the cloud”. The vendor is calling its new, deconstructed approach to base station design and operation lightRadio.

Al-Lu said it intends to form a lightRadio product family formed of a new antenna, multiband remote radio head, baseband unit, controller and management solution.

Although the announcement was given a great deal of fanfare, with announcements like this one from CEO Ben Wervaayen, “lightRadio will signal the end of the base station and tower as we know it today”, stripped down the ambitious announcements look like this:

• The antenna, called lightRadio cube, is a new, multi-mode (2G, 3G, LTE) array with the ability to allow vertical beam forming, which Al-Lu said could increase capacity in urban sites by 30%. The antenna is designed to save space, allow more flexibility in installation,
• Base station components move to SoC: Freescale Semiconductor and Al-Lu are working to put base station components onto programmable hardware, with the idea being that network processing can take place either where it does now, at the site, or “in the cloud”
• A compression algorithm to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to backhaul traffic.
• Virtualisation software from HP that is intended to allow dynamic load balancing, delivering a “cloud like” architecture for controllers and gateways.

The announcements are all positioned as saving on power, site cost, and bandwidth – to reduce the cost of operating future mobile networks, and meet the demand for more smaller, high capacity, cells in heterogenous networks.

But at the moment they form a vision more than any reality. The active antenna is intended to be ready by 2012, with trials later this year. Other elements of the programme will be available from 2012 at the earliest, Al-Lu said, with other elements being available into 2013 and 2014

The supporting quote that Al-Lu lined up for its announcement also reflected the fact that this is still a work in progress. “Verizon looks forward to learning more about the benefits of light Radio technology, and how they could be applied,” siad tom Sawanboori, VP Technology Planning at Verizon Wireless, a major Al-Lu customer.